Any questions, issues, comments, please email john.keenan@newman.ac.uk
The MA Education conference is scheduled for Saturday 11th February. Book to attend the conference
You are welcome to attend only, or to attend and deliver a presentation.
To deliver a presentation, send a brief abstract of 50 to 100 words to
ma-education@newman.ac.uk
Your abstract should contain the following:
Your name
Topic
The rationale for your topic
Context
Potential impact of your focus
4 – 6 keywords
Word count: 50 to 100 words.
Additional Information:
Presentations will be 10 to 15 minutes
The presentation format is flexible.
-Your presentation could be on a research idea, an aspect of your practice, or a reflective piece on a relevant area of interest
-You can present online via teams or on campus.
-We also welcome pre-recorded presentations and short documentaries
-Academic Posters can also be created.
Write to ma-education@newman.ac.uk if you have any questions or need more information.
URLBook here to attend the MA Education conference on Saturday 11th February 2023URLMark as doneBook here for the MA Education Conference on Saturday 11th February 2023Come along and celebrate your learning on the MAUse the networking opportunities with students on the MA Education Programme and students from other Postgraduate programmesTake part and share your expertiseLots of discussions and opportunities to generate new ideas, refine your current ideas and explore future academic, professional and research opportunities.
Module Two: Improvement Project
The second module is…
Module 2 (PFE6/702): Improvement Project and Planning in the Further Education & Skills Sector
It is a chance to research a subject that would improve your practice. You are free to choose what this subject is as long as (1) it is about Further Education/Skills and (2) it is about a subject that will improve what you do on a day-to-day basis. This does not have to be in the classroom, but can be about you and your professional development. You can examine, for example, something about a role you would like to move into. Equally, if you feel there is an aspect of your day-to-day practice which affects your performance, you can examine this.
This is secondary research on the subject only. There will be no primary study so no need to interview, consult research methods books or apply for ethical permission. All you are doing in this module is finding out more about something you want to know which is connected to your working life. It is hoped that this research will lead to a change of practice or perspective, and this can be documented in the assignment.
The assignment is produced in three forms. The first part is a review of the literature. Here, you show wide-reading, the ability to connect ideas from a range of sources, and consider the nature of this research. This is not a place to repeat theory but examine it. The poster takes the same body of research and presents it as a (1) summary and (2) improvement plan which documents how this topic and research may alter your practice. The third part of the assignment is a 10-minute recording of your talking through this poster and adding a this section, professional development opportunities which documents how you might be able to further research the subject and allow what you have found out affect others. This might be through conferences, moving to publication, blogs, meetings and informal discussions with colleagues.
Analysis of professional practice: 2000-word literature review on effective FE practice that informs and identifies an area for improvement.
1000-word equivalent academic poster: summarising key elements from their improvement project (25%)
Supported by 1000-word equivalent video recording (with notes) that narrates and shares the key themes surrounding the area for improvement.
There is more information on this assignment in the PowerPoint and presentation recording below.
One way of developing your role beyond the PG Certificate in FE is to study further and present at conferences. The PowerPoint below has details of a conference on Saturday 11th February which, we hope, you will be willing to allow your posters to be shown and/or deliver the results of your research.
Other universities provide the means to study further and become an active participant in the research/practice community. Teach Meets, for example, provide a forum for new ideas. You are warmly invited to send in ideas to this conference at Worcester University and to attend/listen/engage with the ideas of others.
Thanks all for engaging with the afternoon session. It was good to see a showcase of the interactive technology around. The presentations and results are below. I have put the presentations onto the Core Secondary Moodle page as WordPress (the free version) does not permit Gif/movies.
Theme 2 is about the nature of learning, ways of teaching and how to assess pupils’ work.
As with all four themes, it will be delivered in a ‘spiral’ manner – meaning, we will begin the teaching on it then later build on the learning. Note that two verbs are used: teaching and learning. They are two different things and we will stress how, while you have to develop as a teacher, it is the learning you inspire that matters. You could be a ‘whizz-bang pro’ in the classroom with the style, charisma and technological know-how but unless the pupils are learning, there is little point to your (albeit in theory, wonderful) lessons. We have, therefore, kept the two issues separate. You need to know how to teach but, above all, you need to know how pupils learn. Having inspired learning, you will need to know how to assess according to the guidelines and standards in schools as well as to know what to do in the classroom to check learning. The first day’s teaching on this – on Monday September 14th – will start you thinking about the nature of all three aspects. 1. Introduction to the Nature of Learning
2. Assessment for Learning – PowerPoint (with tasks to consider) and Resources
3. The fusion of Teaching, Learning and Assessment.
The zoom link for the introduction at 10 am is below. At this session we will guide you through the rest of the day.
Lisa Vickerage-Goddard is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
In the morning, there are two recorded sessions. The first is on what it means to ‘learn’ and the second is an introduction to learning theory. We are more than the transmitters of knowledge. This may even be seen as the lowest level of what it means to learn. Instead, learning needs to take in the whole person including their moral, cultural and spiritual development. These are part of the wider National Curriculum and should be seen in lessons. From here, we need to think about how we can use the time and space of our lessons to help pupils to develop. Learning in its widest sense means change – of belief, of feeling, of knowledge, of behaviour, of potential to behave etc. Therefore, when we think about the learning outcomes we are creating, what exactly do we want to change – and why? Is it the thinking about a subject or is it the confidence to apply previous ideas to new situations? Then, having established the learning outcomes, think about why the pupils would need or want to know what is being presented. These sessions encourage you to see the pupil as self-motivated learners. This may not mean towards what you are trying to teach so it is worth thinking about how to direct their natural desire to learn towards your lessons. You also need to know what the pupil already knows in order to develop their learning. All of these ideas are examined by learning theory which is outlined and introduced in the presentations. Take each presentation at your own pace and reflect on and debate what is stated as they are there to initiate discussion rather than to present knowledge.
The first video, about the nature of learning is here:
You can read more on each learning theory at this website:
Introduction to assessmentFilePlease watch this panopto recording at the start of the afternoon as an introduction to assessment and explaining the directed tasks for the rest of the afternoon.
AfL Directed task 1 – Dylan Wiliams videoURLWatch the Dylan Wiliams you tube video on what formative assessment is and isn’t. The accompanying power point slides should also be downloaded and viewed. Write a reflection on this video.Ask yourself the following questions: What have I learnt from this? What will I take forward into my own classroom practice?What will I try not to do in my classroom?We will return to this reflection when we pick up theme 2 again later in the academic year.
One task you might be asked to do while an English teacher is to plan a school trip, usually to the theatre and usually to London. This is a valuable way for pupils to experience the texts and, it could be argued, an essential way to experience plays which were never written to be read as playscripts.
While the benefits are clear, so are the problems.
This section has been written to make a case for trips, to consider some of the dangers and the ways of mitigating them. In short, school visits are wonderful learning spaces and they can be carried out safely but you need a legal, ethical and sensible approach.
The Benefits
Firstly, take a bit of time to think about the most valuable experiences you had at school. The chances are among them is a trip somewhere. These events we remember in ways that an everyday school experience we do not. If learning can be seen as a process of change, then the trips can change how we saw ourselves, developed our confidence with interacting with others and widened our life-choices. This latter point is important as for some pupils there have been no trips abroad and no trips outside of the town or city in which they were born. This may be hard to imagine but financial and cultural factors can tie a child in to a region. Schools can open the child up to another world.
There is a lovely film called The Angels’ Share in which such people are taken on a trip by their probation-worker
At one point in the film, one Glaswegian looks up at Edinburgh Castle and asks what that is. The bemused probation worker asks him if he was, “Born in a cupboard? Did your Ma no have shortbread at home?”
While the outcome of this particular trip did not result in a legal outcome, it opened their eyes to a new world.
The ‘How to Do’
Before you organise a school trip, you must realise that it is a big undertaking and not one to be done ‘lightly.’ You will need to plan months ahead. It will involve consent from parents, health and safety assessments, financial considerations (including legal ones), costings and practical arrangements. At the end of all of this, the coach may not come and leave you stranded, at best, at school, so you will also need contingency plans.
Organising a trip, then, is not something you will do too often at first but it is really good to do it in your first year. If planning a trip in the summer term, start the process in the Autumn term. First, have a look through these guides and learn about some of the benefits of taking trips and the potential pitfalls and hazards.
Link to the curriculum
It is important that there is a reason for your chosen trip. It must link to your curriculum topic and link to your planned classroom activities to bring learning to life and consolidate their learning. In the case of English, it might be to an author’s house, to a national or regional conference or, more likely, to a trip to the theatre. Whatever the case, a trip starts with a sense of purpose. You may be able to make it cross-curricular so history and English may benefit from a trip to a museum on a topic you are studying a text about. If so, it may double the coach-load but will bring in another member of staff to help with the planning.
Financial Implications
If you are working at an independent school or a further education college, there may be an issue about taking any trip which had not been advertised in advance. This is worth checking, as there can be no additional costs added on to a course which were not agreed in advance. Most schools will be immune from the Consumer Rights Act 2015 but fee-paying schools are providing a paid-for service which means that what is being offered must match what is provided. This is the same for some FE courses. Before you plan a trip, make sure if does not contravene this Act. If a trip was promised and it does not materialise it contravenes the Act. If there were no trips planned and one is arranged at a cost to the individual it also contravenes it. Fee-paying schools and FE will have an arrangement in place but before you even start to plan, check that you can run it with a member of the senior leadership team.
For non-fee-paying schools, the pupil does not act as a consumer but you cannot add on any trip which is essential to the curriculum nor insist that pupils/parents pay.
If the parent cannot afford the trip, there is usually a ‘slush fund’ in the school but, again, check that it is there before you plan and remember, some parents are on the ‘breadline.’ Mumsnet is always a good place to hear of such concerns
Imagine, telling a child that although all of her/his friends are going on a trip, s/he cannot go! This is something to consider and think about the cost of a trip, ways of paying for it and whether you have an alternative for those who cannot afford it. It may be that you set up fund-raising early to give everyone a chance to go and it may link well with another aspect of your teaching such as a teaching session on charity appeals or rhetorical language.
Risk Assessments
Risk assessments must be implemented for every trip. Each school should have a trained Educational Visits Coordinator who will support you when completing the risk assessment:
Evaluate the impact of the visit – links to curriculum / outcomes / activities as a result of the trip
Consider the cost of the trip – including transport
Consider risks – what risks might occur, by whom, what can you put in place to reduce or avoid the risk:
transport – what will happen in case of an emergency/breakdown?
contact phone numbers for emergencies
emergency situations – if a child is poorly / injured
adult ratio – do you need volunteers? Safeguarding?
other members of the public around the site
toilet areas – safeguarding
lunch – for those who get free school meals & packed lunches (allergies) / seating areas
barriers for those with health issues – disabled access?
Health and Safety – dress code / potential hazards or dangers around the sight /
Medical – first aid / medication / travel sickness
For further reference on this subject, visit this site:
While you cannot actually do the trip, you could think about where you would want to go and to start the planning process. Your task is to complete this form for an imaginary activity – you may go anywhere on this planet!When you have decided where you want to go, complete this form. When you have done this, you can use it as evidence of having engaged with Standard 8 in your PDP.
have a clear purpose for the visit and evaluate how it will meet the learning objective for the curriculum topic;
research venues online and select an appropriate one for your trip;
take into account the content of this document when planning your trip;
produce a pack of information/resources containing all of the details you have produced in the planning of this trip to help it run smoothly. Include a timeline of the process that you went through in planning the trip.
Click on this link and go through the issues on here to ensure you have not missed anything.
When you have done this initial assessment, click on the file – ‘Risk School to Complete.’ This is a typical form you would have to complete. Consider the detail of how each hazard has been mitigated and also whether it is possible to fill in some of the blanks.
Get into the mindset of anticipating possible danger rather than trying to minimise the potential for risks. To get you in the mood for how much you need to be aware of possible risks, look at this advice on the form First Aid.
Example 1: a walk to the local library on a footpath adjacent to a public road with ambulance access.
The school must have first aid provision on site (not necessarily accompanying the group); so must the library. The Visit Leader has some basic knowledge of first aid and is carrying a mobile phone in an area of good reception. A qualified first aider would be a bonus, but is not required.
Example 2: a walk along a rural footpath, with no vehicular access for about 2 miles, to a picnic site.
Any significant injury here would involve such a time delay in accessing an ambulance as to make it necessary for there to be someone with appropriate first aid training and expertise as a member of the group, carrying a mobile first aid kit.
Both seem like perfectly easy activities, yet need to have medical awareness. Then, amplify this by having 60 14-year-old pupils walking around London’s West End.
Conclusions
This page has been set up to start you thinking about planning a trip. In reality, there will be a school link to guide you through. The school will not let you arrange a trip without the proper staffing and support in place but it is a very good idea for you to think ahead and anticipate issues and have a sense of what needs to be considered. Above all, while it brings extra work for you, trips will enhance everything you do in the classroom and will bring a stronger bond between you and them as you have shared something. You may not get many thanks from the pupils but they will look back on the day or week they had on a school trip and be grateful. If you are not sure about that think back to a school trip you went on and try to remember who went with you and what effect it had on the way you saw them.
Last week, we looked at linguistics and semiotics. These are both big fields and have a language of their own to explain and explore how we communicate. You should have a sense of how words are formed from phonemes and morphemes and act as signs. Once a signs is received by someone, there is a process of denotation where its properties are explored and connotation where its meanings were received. Signs do not act in isolation but in relation with other signs so context is all important including other signs that are around the word. Words are stored in schemas in the brain and we keep similar signs in the same area and they are viewed in relation to each other. This means that whenever we speak, we have a range of options and select the one which we feel most appropriate. Communication (co is a prefix meaning ‘with’) happens between people and these range of options are shared so when we use an adjective such as ‘good’ we both know we could also have used ‘brilliant’ and so each sign is viewed by what is not said as much as what is said. More on this can be found in books on linguistics and semiotics but if you have an understanding of these subjects: phoneme, morpheme, word, sign, denotation, connotation, pragmatics and syntagmatics, it is a start to understanding the nature of language.
This week, we are going to study grammar. The aim is that by the end of it you will be able to identify the 7 classifications of language. There are only 7 reasons for a word to exist. Some words are things (people, places, ideas etc.) and these are nouns. Some words are actions – verbs. These two functions make up the heart of a sentence and are the basis of communication. Most sentences are uttered to indicate a thing does something. For example, we might state, “I am going out.” The thing is ‘I’ and the action is ‘going out.’ We might request a book from a library: “i would like that book.” Again, the thing is I and the action is to want the book.
The noun and the verb are supported by additional types of words. Adjectives and adverbs describe them. An example of an adjective for a noun is ‘big’ as in a ‘big elephant.’ An example of an adverb is ‘quickly’ as in’ start quickly.’ A determiner also gives more information about the noun but it informs about how many of the nouns there are and who owns is. We might write ‘My house’ and the ‘my’ determines who owns it. If it was Cyril’s house, Cyril would be the determiner. Note here that Cyril is no longer a noun. A noun is a function and we have to think about a sentence and what the word is doing. In this case, ‘Cyril’ is determining who owns the noun and the noun is ‘house.’ There is also a preposition which gives detail of the position of the noun – whether it is ‘on,’ ‘in,’ ‘outside’ etc. A conjunction links words – ‘and,’ ‘but,’ ‘because’ etc.
So: noun, verb, determiner, adjective, adverb, proposition, conjunction are the 7 functions of words. Learning this is relatively easy but putting it into practice less so. Then, there are sub-groups to each function so nouns can be concrete, abstract, proper and common and verbs have many sub-forms. This week, as a minimum, you must learn the functions and be able to spot them in easier texts as well as learn some of the sub-functions of the kind you will need to teach in schools.
The glossary is launched this week. This will be an ongoing project – to make sure you know all of the words on this word-sheet which the government expects teachers of Key Stage 2 to know. As you will be teaching English at Key Stages 3, 4 and potentially 5, it is essential knowledge.
For literature, you will be studying Shakespeare’s life and a couple of texts from around his era for comparison – The Faerie Queene and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The reason for the comparison texts is to show how Shakespeare’s work was positioned in his era – poetry and dramatic arts were the popular art forms of the day.
These are the tasks this week.
1. Complete as much as you can of the Glossary Words sheet.
2. Read and make notes of Words and Rules by Steven Pinker.
3. Identify the nouns and verbs in four extracts from poems.
4. Read and make notes from Masterman’s Advance Level English chapter on grammar.
5. Identify the type of noun from the list.
6. Using the links for Grammar Monster, read, complete the activities and make notes on the five functions of language.
7. Study both The Faerie Queene and Doctor Faustus and write a short reflection on how they match Shakespeare’s work.
8. From the many links and sources provided including the Bill Bryson chapter make notes on the life and times of William Shakespeare.
9. Make a list of other activities completed during the week.
This is the first week for those on the 8-week Pre-GCSE course and the fifth week for those on the 12-week course.
Each week will include English language and English literature teaching.
English Language.
This week is an introduction to linguistics and semiotics. It tries to get to the ‘heart’ of what language is. The start is a look at the nature of what we are doing when we communicate. Then, it considers how language works. In order to explain and explore this complex task, there are many new words to comprehend the meaning of.
English Literature
This week takes you from the dawn of time to 1500. Fortunately, when we think of English literature, there is not much considering the centuries of time. Ballads, poems, stories etc. would have been handed down orally through the centuries and many of them were lost and a few fragments survive – in nursery rhymes, for example. Otherwise, the survival of English literature texts depended on the earliest printing press and this was costly and highly regulated meaning few art-forms were printed. One text, fortunately, survived in this manner: The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. The work is alive, nuanced, complex and funny. Another text, William Langland’s Piers Plowman also survives and it gives a sense of how a purpose of poetry – to describe the beauty and complexity of life – was there many centuries ago. Apart form ensuring you are familiar with the texts, the task is also to try to comprehend the Middle English they were written in and get a sense of from where the language of today evolved.
Tasks
All nine tasks must be completed by the following Monday at 10am when the portal will close. This means that no work can be uploaded to these sites after this time. Try to do the work on a Monday to Friday basis if you can. If the work is completed and the brief has been followed you will pass the course. If the work is not completed and the brief has not been followed, you will fail the course. If you are struggling at any point contact John on john.keenan@newman.ac.uk for support.
Below is the support materials both the PowerPoint on which are the activities and instructions. Each slide has a speaker so listen to commentary as you go through. There are also additional documents that you will need to complete the tasks.
The eight tasks this week are as follows.
1. Make notes on the PowerPoint presentation. Upload to Moodle.
2. Write a definition for each of the terms the slide. If you do not know what the term means, just write the word down. Upload to Moodle.
3. You may work in a group to complete this activity if you would like to. If you do, put all of the names of the people you worked with on the document. Please upload only one document to Moodle and make sure you all upload the document separately. Make four worksheets to be used in a classroom for Year 10 pupils teaching them about morphemes.
4. Read the extract from Daniel Chandler’s book, Semiotics. From your reading of this text, write in your own words what the following mean: langue, parole, sign, denotation, connotation. Upload to Moodle.
5. Either in a group or individually, create resources to teach each concept information to a Year 10 class. You must make it accessible to 14-15 year old children.•Connotation•Polysemic signs•Semantic markers•Syntagm•paradigm
Put your names of those who worked on the resources on the worksheets and upload them to Moodle as one file.
6. Create your own translation of Piers Plowman. If you do not understand a word, do not look it up but put a question mark down in your translated text. Upload to Moodle.
7. Complete the subject knowledge audit. Instructions for completion are on the sheet. Upload this to Moodle.
8. Write down any additional work you have been completing through the week. Upload this to Moodle.
On Wednesday 27th May there will, no longer, be an English PGCE session starting in ED008 at 9.30am. The day will, no longer, start with a talk by an NQT followed by a talk on teacher identity. In the afternoon, there will, no longer, be a visit to New Walk Museum.
Instead, there is a virtual visit to a museum and it is designed to help inspire you to write. Let’s look at an example of someone inspired to write by an object (albeit an engraving of an object):
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both, (I have left a bit out…)
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Here, Keats odes on a Grecian Urn fantasising about the images he sees and concludes that beauty is all. To remain in this rapturous mode, we can move to his half-rhyming fellow poet, Yeats.
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged mad is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Like Keats, the old mystic, seeks beauty and permanence but this time in his next incarnation as his soul returns, he hopes, into an art-form – a mechanical golden bird.
In these poems, art is all. In your poems, you may, likewise, seek art’s spiritual heights but you may also, like Auden, find interest in the background of a piece of art – a poem which wins an award for ‘convoluted syntax in an opening line.’
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance, how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
To notice how there are off-centre events in a painting is true vision.
So far, though, so male and so dead. What about poets of today? Stephen Fry opined:
‘Like so much of what passes for poetry today it is also listless, utterly drained of energy and drive – a common problem with much contemporary art, but an especial problem with poetry that chooses to close itself off from all metrical pattern and form. It is like music without beat or shape or harmony: not music at all, in fact.’
But, it is easy to write in such generalised terms. There is a thriving poetry scene in Britain and it occurs in bars and cafes in every town and city. I got introduced to it when my brother-in-law who is a ‘systems architect’ – something to do with computers at the end I do not not understand – decided he was also a poet and so he is. He loves his poetry, writes and publishes on Amazon and performs where he can including, recently in a church in Coventry (which houses, apparently, an actual finger from St Valentine) on St Valentine’s Day. Performance poetry brings everything alive:
Out of such a scene came Clive Allen’s: ‘Explaining the Plot of Bladerunner to my Mother who has Alzheimer’s’ – the title alone I find moving, which is a good job as I cannot find the poem anywhere. Clive Allen was a maths teacher who came up through entering poetry competitions to be nominated for the Forward Prize only to have been found to have plagiarised some earlier poems and had to withdraw. From such vagaries of life comes words – and poetry is not about publishing and certainly not about making money. It is the curse of capitalism that it reduces success of art to be seen in this form. Poetry is about art, expression, the sacred self. It can be about fun, as our ageing but current poet Roger McGough shows
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions…
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins, it’s like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything
Which brings me round to you.
You have words as wide as Canada from a language that evolved from almost every Western European language there is along with the wider world languages which, like the people who come here, enrich this language further . You have the freedom of a language with no fixed grammar and can go syntax-crazy. You have forms: riddle, ballad, sonnet, acrostic, clerihew, haiku and these are only from the top of my head where the idioms of this wonder-language sit. The tools are certainly there for the job.
We would have gone to New Walk Museum to get some inspiration for the poetry-writing and to give you some precious time to do it BUT precious time has been given now though the museums remain shut. Unless, we consider the virtual world to be real in which case…
One aspect of poetry which is so important – and so hard to get right – is matching the rhythm with the words. The PowerPoint below goes over some of the main terms used when describing rhythm and it contains some more examples of poems which may further inspire. Sylvia Plath was a master of rhythm. If you read the excellent first chapter of The Savage God by Alvares, you get a real sense of a poet who knew her words lived through rhythm.
Back to Stephen Fry
I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.
There is a lot of Greek in research methods and ‘ethnos’ meaning, roughly, people, and ‘graphs’ meaning, roughly, to study results in ethnography as the study of people.
It is fitting to use Greek as they were among the first to exercise ethnography. One finding was by Herdodotus in the fifth century BC
This is a good starting point as Herodotus knew that the customs of people become normalised. To an outsider – an ethnographer – they can be viewed differently. The ethnographer, then, ‘stands back’ and observes the customs and practices of others and documents them in order to learn more.
If we fast-forward a couple of thousand years, formalised ethnography was being used at Harvard Business School in order to improve industry. One key researcher was Elton Mayo, whose ethnography – observing how people worked, moved industry away from trying to use scientific calculations to improve productivity towards thinking about people and how we might be encouraged to work better – or ‘human relations’ as it is known. He is one of the team which also brought about the best criticism of ethnography – the Hawthorne Effect. The Hawthorne Effect is the impact on being researched. When we are watched, it changes us as we know what we do matters. This observation came about when a new manufacturing technique was being trialled in a factory and those with clipboards went to see if it improved productivity. It did. Then those with clipboards went away and it did not. In other words, if we are watched we work better and so, places of employment became more open so we could all watch each other.
One of Mayo’s junior fellows at Harvard, William Whyte was living in an Italian neighbourhood in Boston and wanted to know more about it, particularly, why people joined gangs and the violence that ensued. In order to make it more palatable to Harvard Business School it was called a leadership investigation – why people followed the gang leader. Whyte formed a bond with one gang leader, Doc, explained his project and was taken on board to study the gang – first hand by entering into their worlds. This meant putting himself at risk and observing criminal activity which he was not allowed to report. Ethos processes were different in those days. Whyte explains the process below.
While the study, called Street Corner Society, gave real insight into gang culture in a way that interviewing or questionnaires could never do, the inevitable happened – the ethnographer affected the study.
This move from c.500BC to c.1950 AD does not mean ethnography did not happen in between. Anthropologists, such as the famous ones – Margaret Mead and Claude Levi-Strauss – went out to tribal areas to discover more about them and also about human nature. Pierre Bourdieu started out as an ethnographer of the Algerian people – a task implemented by the French government who were interested in winning over the ‘hearts and minds’ of Algerians in order to govern them. Learning about people has very different reasons and it can involve ‘going native’, even being undercover or it can be part of research and add to the insights gained from other methods. This is what Judith Rollins did. As a black female researcher wanting to know more about the relations between female white bosses and their black employees she became a domestic help. She felt she needed to live the experience before she could write about it.
Rollins’s study method is outlined here.
As with many ethnographers, going in to directly observe is just one of the ways of discovering more as it was to be joined with interviews. But first, she was to work for ten employees. Her rich study Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers revealed so much more about life, race, the construct of being a ‘woman’ and human relations than if she had got the knowledge/experience second hand.
If you are researching in education, you will be an ethnographer anyway – it means studying people. The term, though, is uses to denote someone who directly observes others. This research method is in contrast with interviews, when there is a reliance on the spoken word or questionnaires which gather opinions of others.
To be an ethnographer, then, you need to enter into the field as it is called. This means, for this studying education, going to the place where learning should take place and watching what happens. The level of formality can vary. You can take notes on, say a class. You can devise a coding schedule of certain behaviours that you are looking for -for example, you might be looking at engagement and you create a list of all of the ways this can be shown – hands up, straight posture, leaning forward, smiling etc.
Of course, you can join the field and as a teacher, you are an ethnographer of education anyway. We all learn from doing and being part of. For formal research, this has to be formalised and the ethics need to be considered in advance as well as setting out the limits of who is being researched, when, how and then, they must be properly informed.
As with all research methods, it is not done in isolation. Researchers rely on the established methods of those who have gone before. There is an episteme in place in academia which informs what can be done and how and this must be adhered to. It does not mean it is correct (the episteme used to let Herodotus create his rather dishonest depiction of other races). You would need to engage with the ethical processed and beliefs of today before starting.
Read the following as a start point and observe the methods.
If you wished to avoid the minefield of ethical approval for studying others, particularly children, you can always study yourself.
Again, we turn to the Greek – auto for self so it becomes autoethnography.
You could study how you are affected by a phenomenon or teaching experience. Again, it has to be done in a formalised way but if you follow those who have gone before and been accepted in the academic world then you are on safe ground.
I engaged in some education research a few years ago and used autoethnography but this time, I turned the students into autoethnographers. This means I arranged a series of task to help others to study themselves. The details are in this paper but, in short, I used autoethnographic estrangement – putting other in a situation where they feel strange in their environment so that they can study the environment from an outsider’s perspective. It means removing other people from their comfort zones – in fact, making them uncomfortable. At the time, I was teaching about consumer culture and wanted the students to realise how controlled shopping areas were. The students were set tasks, such as ordering exactly the same meal twice from McDonald’s. This was designed to let them see how scripted the performance of the workers are in fast food chains and the realisation of this by a student gave us the title: ‘I am a Starbucks worker. My life no longer belongs to me’ as through the activity, the reflective process and discussion, she realised her own employers were telling her what to say and controlling her emotions. The full account is here. If memory serves, there is not as much on ethics as there should have been!
I did, though try to replicate parts of this study with PGCE PE students by disabling them in some way and asking them to reflect on their experiences. The purpose was to give those who were going to teach PE a better understanding of what it is like to not be fully abled when performing sports and exercise.
The study came to nothing in the end as while the exercises were done and it was all followed the response of the trainees offered, I thought, no insight into how it had affected them. The memory of trying to fit 8 wheelchairs into a Fiat Panda to do this exercise stayed with me, though.
To sum up, any educational researcher is an ethnographer as education is about people. Yes, you can study processes but people will be putting the processes into place and people are affected by the processes. If any of the research is to be used then the ethnographic process needs to be formalised – modelled on previous research – planned and go through a process of external ethical checks. If you can get to even a proportion of the insight of Rollins and Whyte, then it would all be worth it.
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